CALL FOR PAPER OFFERINGS for LREC Shared Task on Reproducibility

CALL FOR PAPER OFFERINGS for LREC Shared Task on Reproducibility

Did you author a recent paper in the area of Natural Language
Processing and Computational Linguistics, and are you interested in
further visibility of your paper, and wondering how well other
researchers are able to reproduce your results?

Scientific knowledge is grounded on falsifiable predictions and thus
its credibility and raison d’être relies on the possibility of
repeating experiments and getting similar results as originally
obtained and reported. In many young scientific areas, including
ours, acknowledgment and promotion of reproduction of
results need very much to be increased.

LREC SESSION ON REPRODUCIBILITY

For this reason, a special reproducibility session will be included
into the LREC 2020 regular program (side by side with other sessions
on other topics) for papers on reproducibility, and a specific
community-wide exercise will be launched to elicit and motivate the
spread of work on reproduction: a Shared Task on Reproducibility.

REPRODUCIBILITY AND REPLICATION

We are adhering to the terminology assumed in the introductory note of
the special section on replicability and reproducibility of The
Language Resources and Evaluation journal (March 2017, Volume 51,
Issue 1, pp 1-5), which follows Stodden (2014): “Replication, the
practice of independently implementing scientific experiments to
validate specific findings, is the cornerstone of discovering
scientific truth. Related to replication is reproducibility, which is
the calculation of quantitative scientific results by independent
scientist using the original datasets and methods.” For the ease of
reference and when there is no need to be more explicit, we will be
using the terms “reproduction” and “reproducibility”.

COOPERATIVE SHARED TASK

The shared task is of a new type: it is partly similar to the usual
competitive shared tasks — in the sense that all participants share
a common goal; but it is partly different to previous shared tasks —
in the sense that the focus is on seeking support and confirmation of
previous results, rather than on overcoming those previous results
with superior ones. Thus instead of a competitive shared task, with
participant struggling for a top system that scores as far as possible
from a rough and ready baseline, this will be a “cooperative shared
task”, struggling for a system that reproduces as close as possible
the results of an original research experiment.

Accepted papers reporting the findings of shared task participants
will be published in the regular LREC Proceedings.

CALL FOR PAPER OFFERINGS

For this cooperative shared task, the organizing committee will select
a small set of research papers. Since this is the first time such
shared task is organized, it seems advisable to enlist only original papers
whose authors explicitly accept that their paper is the subject of this
exercise.

We therefore are asking authors to offer their paper as a
candidate target paper for the Shared Task on Reproducibility. This
is a great possibility for your paper to receive additional attention and
recognition by the research community. We are seeking offerings by
authors of papers that meet the following requirements:

* experiments reported in the paper only need access to resources (data
sets,
corpora, software tools) that are easily available for other researchers
(e.g., there are no IPR restrictions, expensive software is not required,
no excessive computational resources are required).

* authors of the paper are happy to be the target of the shared task, and
will be prepared to answer simple questions from shared task participants
(a forum will be set up in such a way that all participants share the same
information).

SELECTION OF PAPERS

The selection committee will select a small number of
target papers, based on the criteria listed above, and taking into
account aspects of balance so that there will be enough variety with
respect to research field, computational and algorithmic techniques,
target language(s), etc.

DETAILS

If you want your paper to be considered for the Shared Task on
Reproducibility, please submit a short note (200-400 words) stating

* your motivation for offering your paper

* an indication what resources are required for reproduction, and
under what conditions these resources are available